View full sizeYfat YossiforLogan Troester of Saginaw Township, 15, uses a simulator to practice texting-while-driving Monday at driving training course in Saginaw Township. This simulation was part of a presentation given by an injury prevention specialist from Covenant HealthCare on texting-while-driving.

SAGINAW TWP. — The spread of cellphones and gadgets since the early 2000s is nowhere more obvious than in a classroom full of teens.

View full sizeYfat YossiforBen Kastros of Saginaw Township, 14, uses a simulator to practice texting-while-driving Monday at driving training course in Saginaw Township. He crashed the simulation car while texting, injuring his passenger. A injury prevention specialist from Covenant HealthCare gave a presentation and simulation of texting-while-driving.

ouths, eight boys and a girl ranging from 14 to 16, as if programmed, remove their earphones, switch off screens and ringers and slide the handheld devices into bookbags and pockets.

Jablonski, a Michigan Driving School instructor, teaches 400 kids each year, at $285 apiece, during three-week courses about how to drive.

On this day, he hands over the instructional reins.

To the front of the room steps 6-foot-something Robert Warnemuende, an injury prevention specialist with Covenant HealthCare.

He’s spent more five and a half years in the emergency room and works as a Mobile Medical Response emergency medical technician.

While he was playing video games with an uncle on Dec. 14, 1995, Warnemuende’s mom informed him his father wouldn’t be there for Christmas.

He’d been killed by a drunken driver.

Warnemuende now travels to schools, special events and drivers training classes throughout Midland, Saginaw and Bay counties warning inexperienced drivers of the potentially lethal outcome of distracted driving, especially while using cellphones.

“I’m going to give you a number,” he says, as some students lean on elbows or slouch with their hooded sweatshirts draping over the backs of their chairs.

“Seven.

“Seven teenagers I’ve had to clean up and prepare for their parents to say goodbye. That’s why I’m here today.

"I don’t want that number to go up.”

Distracted driving is the No. 1 killer of teens 16 to 19. Eight teens die because of it every day, and more than 3,000 died in the U.S. in 2009, says Warnemuende, rattling off statistics.

Unfortunately, he says, many students “learn it’s OK” to use cellphones while driving from watching their parents.

View full sizeYfat YossiforOlivia Oravitz of Saginaw Township, 14, uses a simulator to practice texting-while-driving Monday at driving training course in Saginaw Township. This simulation was part of a presentation given by an injury prevention specialist from Covenant HealthCare on texting-while-driving.

A list of driving distractions appear on 24-inch screen at the front of the room — changing radio stations, riding with friends, eating or drinking, applying makeup.

The final distraction is in bold red letters: “Cell phones,” it says, followed by five exclamation points.

Looking away from the road for five seconds is the equivalent of driving the length of a football field blindfolded. Talking on a cellphone while driving is comparable to driving with a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 and increases your chances of crashing by 23 percent.

Warnemuende asks, “Who’s got a cellphone?”

All of the hands go up.

Jablonski said eight years ago, when he first began teaching driver’s education, only about half the students had cellphones.

“Guys, I have a saying: Life is as simple as you make it,” says Warnemuende, who drives with his set to silent and flipped upside down. “Do you have to text and drive? No. Can you put you cellphone down for five minutes? Yeah.”

Warnemuende tells the class that law enforcement classifies texting and driving — a civil infraction that carries a $100 fine for a first offense and $200 thereafter — as “touching two or more buttons.”

A student is asked to send a call to his mom.

It takes him nine touches.

“I don’t want to have to stand next to the consultation door as the doctor goes in to tell a father that he’s never going to walk his little girl down the aisle,” Warnemuende says. “I don’t want to stand outside that consultation room as a doctor tells a mother that she’ll never see her some walk across the stage.”

During an intermission, the students grab a drink of water, go to the bathroom and a group of four sits at a circular table poking their cellphones.

In the front of the room a steering wheel is clamped to the desk and wires run from a large monitor to foot pedals below.

Wearing a maroon American Eagle-brand hooded sweatshirt, Tyler J. McCartney, a 15-year-old Nouvel Catholic Central High School freshman, takes the controls of the $10,000 distracted-driving simulator.

Students are urged to crowd around, not only to see, but to simulate a carload of hyper high-schoolers.

“Thanks for taking me home, I don’t live that far,” the computer-simulated voice of a female says, and McCartney clutches the small steering wheel.

“This seatbelt is uncomfortable, I’m not going to wear it.”

Classmates laugh and make jokes behind McCartney as his cyber-passenger provides direction through a virtual suburban world filled with homes, dogs and an occasional deer.

“Do I have something in my teeth?” asks one class member, prodding McCartney to turn around, and the computer voice asks: “Can you call my brother and see if he’s home?”

A cellphone appears on the touch-screen, and McCartney, a Saginaw Township resident and the son of Tom and April McCartney, gets about halfway through dialing when he has a virtual head-on collision into the sidewall of a highway entrance ramp.

The screen switches to a real-world shot of a rescue helicopter, then a first-person perspective shot of a victim with paramedics hovering above and placing a respirator on the victim’s face.

“Nowadays, kids feel entitled to cellphones... and think they’re invincible, but they really aren’t,” said McCartney later, reflecting on the class. “Adding a cellphone is making you less invincible when you’re behind the wheel.